"Bully Bottom" in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, later an overbearing ruffian, especially a coward who abuses his strength by ill-treating the weak; more technically a _souteneur_, a man who lives on the earnings of a prostitute.

We are here in a confused field where the facts are complicated by a number of considerations, and where circumstances may very widely differ, for the "fancy boy" -- selected from affection by the prostitute herself -- may easily become the _souteneur_, or "cadet" as he is termed in New York, who seduces and trains to prostitution a large number of girls.

Maria R., with her face marked by a terrible scar produced by her _souteneur_, still carefully preserved many years afterward the portrait of the aggressor, and when we asked her to explain her affection she replied: 'But he wounded me because he loved me.'

_souteneur_, although from the respectable point of view he has put himself into a low-down moral position, is, after all, not so very unlike those parasitic wives who, on a higher social level, live lazily on their husbands 'professional earnings, and sometimes give much less than the _souteneur_ in return.